


Midsummer

by orphan_account



Series: Maple Close [2]
Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, I made up parent's names because I don't know them don't mind me, M/M, Reunions, a lot of feelings are had, same age au, this was gonna be short and turned into a whole thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-25
Updated: 2018-03-25
Packaged: 2019-04-08 01:25:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14094003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: midsummer: n. a feast celebrated on the day of your 26th birthday, which marks the point at which your youth finally expires as a valid excuse—when you must begin harvesting your crops, even if they’ve barely taken root. or, eight years later, Shane and Ryan finally meet again.





	Midsummer

**Author's Note:**

> sequel to [Keyframe](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13906593).

It’s August when Shane steps out of a car at 21 Maple Close, feeling a little worse for wear as the taxi driver hands him his monstrous suitcase.   
  
He can’t exactly recall the date he left almost a decade ago but give or take a few weeks, it’s been eight years almost to the day since his mom and dad drove him to the airport to see him off to college.   
  
It’s August, he's twenty-six and he’s back to square one with a film history degree in his pocket and a decade of baggage. 

  
__________________

  
  
  
Being in his childhood bedroom is weird. It’s still the same attic his parents converted into a room to give him more independence as he got older, and he knows they don’t really have a use for the space now, so virtually nothing has changed, and that’s what gets him; he gets caught up in the way some of the books he didn’t take with him are still on the shelf exactly how he left them.   
  
He’s been back for periodic visits and some holidays before, but this time feels different; knowing that he’s going to be staying for the foreseeable contrasts from all the occasions he’s come back to his teenage room with red walls and known it was temporary in the past. And really, he’s hoping this stay doesn’t end up being lengthy, either, but he doesn’t know where to go from here, and the attic room with the faded paint and opened up ceiling to accommodate his height sounds like a safe place to figure it out. 

 

  
__________________

 

He falls into a comfortable morning routine within a week; get up around eight, have breakfast with his mom before she leaves for work, shower, then take his laptop and a mug of coffee with him out in the backyard to sit at the table and either look for jobs or work on some essays about history he hasn’t looked at in a few years. At the weekends, he and his parents sometimes make the one hour drive to Los Angeles and visit his brother there, and Shane feels weirdly comfortable eating overpriced food in the LA sun.  
  
It’s a surprise when his mom comes to get him and his dad when they’re sat outside on a Saturday, discussing future barbecues and real estate in the area if Shane wanted to stay here. “I’m heading across the street for Amanda’s birthday and I mentioned you were here when I ran into her the other day,” she says with a smile, “she was really curious to see you if you wanted to swing by for a while.”  
  
Shane knows there’s no pressure— there never is, his parents have always been patient with him—but he feels slightly seasick for a moment. He hasn’t been across the street since the day he left, and what he might find there kind of scares him, even though he can see the house from his bedroom window. Still, out of both curiosity and wanting to please his mom, he says yes. 

  
  
__________________

 

It’s not as terrifying as he built it all up to be in his head until it is. He’s sat on a couch next to his mom, listening on patiently to a pseudo-catch up on what he missed as he eats great cake until the doorbell rings.   
  
“Excuse me,” says Amanda, and she leaves her half-eaten slice of cake on the coffee table before she gets up to get the door.   
  
An archway leads into the hall where the front door’s just open, and just out of his line of sight, Shane hears a voice say “Happy birthday, mom,” and he breathes in sharp. Not even a moment later, following his mother into the living room is Ryan, and he swears if this were a movie this would be a freeze-frame shot. 

  
__________________

 

Shane’s still in freeze-frame mode a handful of hours later when the light paints oranges and pinks on the fence outside, and outside the window before him, a scene from another time unfolds; Ryan’s parents conversing with his own over the barbecue in the warm summer air. It almost punches him in the gut how much he’s kind of missed this, how he’s looked for the same familiar warmth in other places over the years but never found it. 

“So,” Ryan says from behind him, “this is kinda weird.” 

He turns to face him and Ryan is leaning against the kitchen island, and it’s kind of the first moment he’s had to just look at him, away from the gaggle of guests at the party earlier. The first thing he picks up on is how Ryan’s still just as tall as he was, but he takes up more space now; the light from outside washes over his defined arms and relaxed stance. He kind of curses his mom for saying  _you boys could catch up_  when she noticed they’d both finished eating already and sending them inside.  
  
“Yeah, it is.” He rubs at his neck awkwardly. “I, uh, can’t really believe you’re here.”   
  
Ryan kind of scoffs at that. “I’ve been living an hour from here for years, dude. If anything, I should be the one surprised to see you here.”  
  
And he’s not wrong, not really. Shane had gone back to the state he was born in for college, and some sentimental bullshit part of him at eighteen had almost thought he’d find some of himself there as he walked on the cold soil of Illinois. He’d remained there for two years after graduation doing some teachers’ assistant jobs here and there and made use of the history side of his degree until he’d felt the pull to leave and move to a bigger city where another two years of jobs not really working out had led him right back here.   
  
“Anyway, what are you doing here? Holiday?”   
  
“I—I don’t really know what I’m doing, actually. I think I might stay home for a while.”   
  
“You’ll figure it out,” Ryan tells him as he reaches to pat his shoulder, “you’re a smart dude despite how much stupid shit I’ve watched you do.” 

  
__________________

 

They make small talk for a while and it’s the most comfortable Shane has felt all day, but he’s still thankful when everyone leaves and he’s able to just go upstairs and be by himself.   
  
He stares at the ceiling in bed that night, and he’s still too stunned by his first encounter with Ryan in eight years to sleep. Despite neither of their families ever moving away since they’ve never managed to be in the same place, and he wonders if that’s a fucked up twist of fate, maybe. Shane’s family always came back to Chicago for the holidays, and every time he’d been back in California for a visit after they both graduated college, Ryan had already moved to Los Angeles and taken their memories with him.   
  
He recalls the day he left, his college start date a week earlier than Ryan’s in very late August, and how they’d sat in Ryan’s bedroom and their lips touched for the last time.   
  
It occurs to him then that this is the same bed they had sex in for the first time a week before he left, disillusioned and aware that they wouldn’t last being five states away for four years. If he shuffled just a bit to the right, he’d be in the exact spot it happened in.   
  
It’s not that it didn’t hurt, leaving each other behind—it had hurt like a bitch— but in the daze of college parties and a bunch of firsts away from home, they’d both learned to live without each other eventually. Then, sometime in second year, Shane remembers losing his phone and all of his contacts, and his nineteen-year-old self was too fucking proud to call Ryan’s mom and ask for his number, so he didn’t. He realises now, in his teenage bedroom, that it was one of the stupidest things he did in college. 

  
  
__________________

 

Things don’t fall into place immediately like Shane hoped they would, and in the fall, he’s looking at job listings when one of them particularly catches his eye; the Margaret Herrick Library, where years of film history are catalogued, is looking for a librarian. He applies and gets a call from them within the week.   
  
His new job is in Beverly Hills, and even though it’s outside of LA, moving there and commuting makes more sense than staying at home and driving twice the amount of time, plus the pay’s good, so Shane moves to a one-bedroom apartment in October with the possessions he unloaded from the back of a cab a couple months prior.  
  
He decides that this time, he’s not going to fuck things up again. He opens up Facebook, types up Ryan’s name, and sure enough, there he is. His profile picture is him holding his family dog and smiling wide, and Shane thinks he was right to forbid himself from looking during their years apart; that smile would have made him ache then, and it does now, too. He thinks maybe, a couple years ago, that smile would have made him pack up and run home.

[2:35 PM]: _hey, so I just moved to LA for a job and I think it would be cool to hang out_  
  
[3:08 PM]: **congrats dude!**  
[3:08 PM]: **you doing anything tomorrow afternoon?**

  
  
__________________

 

  
 Ryan meets him near his place, and Shane can’t place why, but he looks warm standing there in his denim jacket and t-shirt.   
  
“So you still haven’t told me where you’re taking me,” Shane says as they fall into step together.   
  
“Jeez, can a man not have a little bit of mystery?”   
  
“I don’t know, you could be trying to kidnap me for all I know.”   
  
“Nah, I don’t think I could ever shove your Bigfoot ass into a car without anyone noticing.” 

“Okay, rude.”  Shane makes a fake offended face, but he’s relieved they can fall into these jokes again.   
  
“We’re here,” Ryan says about five minutes later.   
  
It’s a restaurant, one of those where the front looks like they only serve Instagram-worthy food, and it’s like Ryan can hear him thinking that, because after a few seconds of Shane looking at it, he adds, “I know it’s very on trend, but they do a killer burger.”   
  


 

__________________

 

  
As it turns out, Ryan’s right; the food is great and the inside is actually really cosy, with upholstered leather seats and art hanging on most walls around them. He’s halfway through his burger when Ryan asks him,”so how’s it been on the love front?”   
  
“Why,” Shane laughs into his drink, “is this an interrogation, officer?”   
  
“Just curious what the local cryptid sitting across from me’s been up to is all,” he says playfully.   
  
Shane gives him a smile through a mouthful of food. It’s like they’re picking up where they left off, and really, he shouldn’t be surprised given that Ryan was right there with him for such a long time, but on the way here, a small part of him was afraid they wouldn’t click again; that the connection was lost with no hope of recovering it. He’s grateful that isn’t the case.   
  
“Dated a bunch of people in college, then I had a girlfriend for a couple years after— I haven’t really been with anyone seriously since we broke up.”   
  
“So you’ve been a young bachelor for two years?”  
  
Shane shrugs. Loneliness had undeniably played a part in his decision to move back home; it wasn’t necessarily just romantic love, but also deeper, familial ties he wound up missing. He isn’t going to dwell on that right now, he tells himself.  
  
“You get used to it, eventually. What about you? What’s Ryan Bergara been up to?”  
  
“I met someone in my second year of college and we were together until last year. So in retrospect, not a whole lot.”   
  
Shane kind of freezes up. He did wonder back then, selfishly, why Ryan hadn’t called or tried to reach him when they stopped texting each other a couple times a week; it makes sense now that he knows he was busy getting lost in somebody else. He blinks, and Ryan smiling at him makes it okay, somehow.

  
  
__________________

 

  
By the time they finish up their lunch, it’s about three in the afternoon, and Ryan insists that they walk to Grand Park and find a nice place to sit in the sun. Shane doesn’t object— he feels so full right now he could use a walk, and the weather’s nice for an October day.   
  
They sit near one of the ponds in the park and Shane instinctively picks up some rocks to skip on the shallow water.  
  
“Remember when we ditched last period to go swim in the lake near home?” Ryan asks as he picks up a flat rock and throws it.  
  
“And you got water in your ear and you were convinced you were gonna be deaf in one ear for the rest of your life? I remember.”   
  
They both sigh kind of at the same time, and Shane feels a blanket of nostalgia wrapping around him just like the sun wraps around the trees around the water.   
  
“You know,” Ryan says after a long silence, the rock rippling on the water as a companion for his voice, “when you left, I was kinda mad for a while.”   
  
“Yeah?”   
  
“I sort of—I hated you a little bit.” Another rock skips one, two, three times before sinking into the park water. “I had this picture in my head that we’d go to college together, and when you chose to go to Illinois, I—I don’t know.”   
  
Shane looks down at his hands in his lap. “I’m sorry I didn’t keep in touch. That was my fault.”   
  
It’s the first time since they met up again that he can really feel the weight of all those years on his shoulders, and it’s almost unbearable. He feels like maybe, if he tries reaching for Ryan, he’ll collapse under the pressure.   
  
“I think you actually spared me,” he admits. “talking to you while we were apart hurt a lot.”   
  
Shane finally looks at him, and the sadness in Ryan’s big eyes makes him feel like they’re eighteen again for a moment. He’s twenty-six, but something akin to teenage recklessness washes over him and he tells Ryan, “we could start again, if you wanted.”   
  
“Start what again?”   
  
“Whatever you want, but I was thinking,” he shuffles closer until they’re closer than they’ve been in a lifetime. “maybe, this.”   
  
Ryan gives him the most imperceptible nod, and there isn’t anyone around them to hear him almost whimper when Shane kisses him. 

  
  
__________________

 

When they stumble into Shane’s new apartment, dodging the boxes on their way to his small bedroom, they’re past being patient; in the afternoon light, Ryan pushes him back onto his bed. As he pulls his t-shirt over his head, Shane sits back and takes in how his body’s changed; muscles have blossomed under his light brown skin, and he runs his hands over Ryan’s shoulders before he pulls him in again.   
  
Ryan holds his face with two hands, fingers intertwining with his beard, and it’s like they’re revisiting each other’s bodies, like when you come back to a place you love after a renovation, only to find that even though a couple things are different, everything you loved about it is still there.   
  
“I need you,” Ryan says against his lips, panting and almost trembling with want, and Shane hums in agreement. He’s needed this for so long it kind of scares him.   
  
Shane looks at him the whole time he pounds into him, drinking in the way Ryan arches his back and scrapes his fingernails down his sides, and he thinks this is the most intimate fuck of his life, even if it’s the furthest thing from delicate. It’s like they’ve had years to practice for this, just this, nothing but this.

  
Sometime later, in a sticky tangle of limbs, Ryan says, “Don’t you dare ever leave me again, asshole.”   
  
Shane pulls him close and promises that he never will. 

**Author's Note:**

> yell at me in the comments or on [Tumblr](http://summonedwheezes.tumblr.com/)! and thanks for reading <3


End file.
